


Relativity

by greenglowsgold



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, it's AU fic of AU fic so, look - Freeform, mentions of character death that may or may not have happened??, other characters pop in and out, this one's kind of trippy, warning for somewhat graphic descriptions of blood and gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-16 22:52:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5844103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenglowsgold/pseuds/greenglowsgold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/Hedgi/pseuds/Hedgi">Hedgi's</a> fic <a href="http://hedgiwithapen.tumblr.com/post/138127575062/after-reading-your-legends-of-tomorrow-theory-i">Like a White Door</a>, in which Vandal Savage wreaks havoc on everyone who's stood in his way, starting and ending with the boy with the visions. Cisco sees his friends die every time he closes his eyes, until Savage finally comes for him, too.</p><p>
Or, maybe not. Maybe he doesn't know what he's seeing. Maybe the world isn't as dead as he thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relativity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hedgi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hedgi/gifts).



> This fic will make more sense if you read Hedgi's fic first. Like, way more sense. Or you can just dive on ahead, I mean, it's up to you. All I'm saying is Hedgi's fic is great and you want to read it.

Cisco leaves the hospital two days after he wakes up. It surprises him. Not that he’s gotten out, but that there is an out to get to.

He saw it all burn.

 

 

A dead man drives him home. He frowns a lot and makes sure Cisco wears his seatbelt and pats him gently on the knee. He handles the wheel pretty well, for a corpse. Rigor mortis obviously hasn’t taken much of a toll.

It hasn’t impacted his mood, either, because the man flickers between floods of grief and fiery rage, and neither one of them is quiet. Neither one is stiff. He reminds Cisco that he’s only a phone call away, that he has a gun and the whole force of the police department behind him if that guy (no one has managed to say his name, yet) ever manages to show his face again.

There’s a woman in the backseat, and she’s dead too, wings twisted back and broken, and she tells him things that make the man uncomfortable. She tells him how they took _that guy_ and shoved his own magic back through his heart. She tells him how the (im)mortal enemies of the im(mortal) being drove him to the ground and stole the light from his eyes, his hands. She tells him how they set the body ablaze one last time and ground it into ash, and scattered it into the wind.

Cisco stares out the window so he doesn’t have to watch their faces bleed, and doesn’t bother to tell them that they’ve got it backwards: the rest of the world is on fire, and Savage is the one thing that can walk unhindered through the flames.

 

 

They leave him with a house full of people they say are his family. But even if he didn’t know that’s impossible, he still wouldn’t believe it, because they’re nothing _like_ his family.

Papa fusses the way every ten-year-old wants their father to fuss, but a twenty-three-year-old who’s seen the end of the world is tired of it before it begins. He offers to sit down and watch shows that Cisco hasn’t cared about in years, suggests taking walks around the neighborhood together, brings ice cream back from the store. It’s new, and Cisco doesn’t trust it.

Mama is the same as he remembers her. She still hums when she cooks, says prayers before dinner and bed, and laughs louder than most. It’s just that now, it grates at Cisco. Every _Madre de Dios_ , every chorus of an old song she can’t remember the name of, it scrapes at the inside of his bones like the wail of a banshee. It turns his vision blue.

Dante avoids him. Cisco wishes he wouldn’t, wishes he would tease and poke and rolls his eyes at Cisco, even if it isn’t real. He misses his brother.

As soon as the bandages come off, he moves back to his own apartment, uninhabited by ghosts.

 

 

Reality shifts around him sometimes. The world dies and comes back, and so do the people in it. If he could be certain this life was real, he might call these shifts something like ‘dreams,’ or in certain cases ‘visions,’ but he’s not sure, so he doesn’t.

 

 

He goes back to work the next day, which is hilarious, honestly. He always kind of thought this job might kill him, but he didn’t think he’d still be here after the fact. It’s surreal, walking down the hallways and not seeing scorch marks on the walls, stepping into a room and finding the ceiling intact.

Glancing over his shoulder and seeing a phantom smile at him.

Cisco putters around the labs, building whatever they suggest and not bothering to add many suggestions of his own. He can tell it worries them, but he just doesn’t see the point. Whatever happens, happens.

 

 

He goes grocery shopping, and he stands still for five minutes straight in the middle of the dairy aisle because he _gets_ it now, he finally gets it. He understands what Eobard Thawne was talking about that whole time, because a kid runs by him on her way to the cereal, and he recognizes that kid, and she’s dead.

They’re all dead.

 _You’ve been dead for centuries,_ he remembers, and he leans against the milk coolers and laughs and laughs and laughs. A nervous employee asks him if he’s okay, and he sets his basket of microwave soups down on the floor and leaves.

Of course, the difference between himself and Thawne is that knowing people are dead doesn’t make him ready to kill them again, but still. He kind of gets it.

 

 

The first and only time he gets left alone with Harry is a disaster.

Cisco usually has ghosts following him around everywhere, which is the world’s weirdest haunting, because he’s pretty sure he’s dead too, but he’s never, ever alone. Except that one time when he is, in his workroom, just him and the music and the gears in his hands until Harry walks through the door and wants something from him.

Cisco doesn’t really listen to what it is, beyond the fact that it’s something he has to vibe. He doesn’t really control what he vibes anymore; it just happens, over and over and over (sometimes he wonders if he’s managed to jump into another universe altogether, and he’s having visions of his own dead world from someplace eerily similar). He tells Harry that, and Harry tells him he’s had it up to here with his PTSD bullshit. Cisco turns back to his work.

Harry grabs him by the shoulder, and Cisco’s vision whites out. At first, he thinks he’s having another vision. Then, he thinks he’s dying. Then, he realizes that Harry’s on the floor and his hand is curled into a fist that hurts.

A moment later, Harry is standing again, spitting curses and blood (no, wait, that part doesn’t come yet), and Cisco thinks with a detached carelessness that he’s probably about to get hit, except Barry comes sprinting in out of nowhere and pulls Harry away.

Like he said, he’s always being followed by ghosts these days.

Cisco picks up his project and moves to a different room, doesn’t listen to Caitlin when she asks if he’s okay. Of course he isn’t, but that’s hardly a unique state of being.

 

 

Kendra swings back through town, and she says Carter stays on the ship (Cisco isn’t convinced he actually exists, but okay), but she brings Sara Lance along this time. Cisco recognizes the woman he made a suit for a couple months back. She’s dead, but she’s been dead even before that, so she has experience with it. She’s like Cisco in that way.

She pulls Cisco aside at some point and sits with him at a table in an empty room, tapping her fingers in a way he knows means she’d rather have this conversation while sparring. But she won’t bring that up, because she knows he’s no good at it, and because all the long-sleeve layers in the world can’t cover up the scars that still line his skin bright red.

They discuss states of being, the multiverse and religious viewpoints on Heaven and Hell. (Cisco was raised Catholic, he says, and he knew a lot of peers at college for whom religion faded away during their programs, but it never did for him. _Dios, dame fuerzas._ )

He tells her that she’s dead, and she doesn’t take offense.

She asks him if he’s dead, and he can tell it’s a sincere question. She’s not asking if he _thinks_ he’s dead, she’s asking if he _is_.

He thinks about it.

Decides, surprisingly, that there’s a chance he’s not.

 

 

He decides, surprisingly, that there’s a chance this might be real. He’s not sure what to do with that information.

 

 

He goes and sits in a park for the afternoon, watches people walk by and considers.

It could be true, he supposes. He could be alive. Everyone else could be, too. Savage has destroyed the world before, or at least a small part of it, and Barry’s brought it back. He shouldn’t have been able to, this time, not when Cisco saw him die, but, well. Crazier things.

On the other hand, everyone here could be dead. Maybe that’s why Savage is missing, because he’s still alive somewhere, and this is whatever comes after. Maybe he is dead. Would it make a difference?

It wouldn’t, he decides. He isn’t Eobard Thawne. Relativity as a concept is too heartless for him.

Just because he might be dead doesn’t mean he shouldn't live.

 

 

The first time he cracks a joke, the room is dead silent for a full ten seconds. Then, Iris laughs, high and joyful, and Caitlin follows soon after, and soon the whole room is consumed in something other than fire. Cisco doesn’t quite join in, but he smiles, he’s working on it.

He looks at Barry, and for a split second he sees bone and blood and bile, and then he blinks and it’s gone.

Their faces stay whole the second time around. And the third.

He stops counting after that.

 


End file.
